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Internships

The past few months, we have seen great progress in our new website, thanks to the hard work of our web development team. This summer, we hosted two interns, Katha and Paige, who formed the core of our team, spending many hours making our new website functional and beautiful. With assistance from Lwin, our programmer, and input from Clare, one of our student editors, these two have brought us even closer to the launch of a new and improved website that we are sure our readers will enjoy.

While Paige will be continuing her work on the new website this fall, Katha has reached the end of her internship at the LINGUIST List, and will be returning to Germany soon to finish her bachelor’s thesis. To say goodbye and celebrate the end of our “summer” web development phase, we would like to share with you some of the progress the team has made!

Our new home page features custom graphics for our various services, book announcements from Cambridge University Press, and an RSS feed with the latest issues of the LINGUIST List. Here you’ll always be able to see what’s new, front and center.

The new browse/search form will allow you to search and filter through the latest announcements in each area, making all of our issues easily accessible.

The new submission form is dynamic, easily accessed for any area, and user-friendly for all areas!

As you may have seen for yourself, the new password reset feature is already active. If you forget your password when logging in, you can now use this page to automatically reset your password within minutes.

We wanted to thank you, our readers and supporters, for your donations this year that made it possible for us to support our summer interns and fund this development. We still have some features to develop and corners to polish, but we hope to soon be able to announce the launch of some of these features, so stay tuned!

This summer we have been joined by seven new interns, who are working on projects like redesigning our website, developing new speech corpora, learning the ropes of editing, and more! Learn more about them below. If joining the ranks of these brilliant young interns interests you, watch out for the opening of the 2018 application cycle next spring! In the meantime, you can learn more about getting involved with the LINGUIST List here.

Taitum Caggiano, who is pursuing her Linguistics B.A. at Indiana University, has been working on a few different annotation projects at the LINGUIST List this summer ranging from sibilants in Heritage Polish to voicing in Chatino. She is mostly interested in subjects related to Second and East Asian languages and is planning on teaching English through the Peace Corps after graduation. When she isn’t in the office or busy with other commitments, Taitum enjoys hiking, baking bread, and painting.

Julian Dietrich is joining us for his second year interning at the LINGUIST List. He is currently developing an application for our new website using Django. He’s excited about familiarizing himself with this technology, because he is entering his second year as an informatics major in the fall. In his free time, he likes to hike, travel, and listen to music.

Paige Goulding is working on the redesign of the LINGUIST List website. She is originally from outside Philadelphia, but is in Bloomington pursuing her Master’s in Computational Linguistics from Indiana University. Outside of academia, Paige enjoys writing, baking, dogs, and anything to do with Harry Potter.

Jacob Heredos is a second-year intern who has worked with LL-Map, MultiTree, and San Juan Quiahije Chatino. This summer he is applying updates to MultiTree and annotating the Chatino corpus. Jacob earned his BA in Anthropology, International Studies, and Spanish with a minor in Linguistics from Indiana University in 2016 and will be traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico, after leaving the LINGUIST List in September. In his free time, Jacob enjoys running, cooking, hiking, reading, camping, and learning languages.

Katharina Suhr is working as an intern for the Linguist List from July to October. She studied Information Management in Hannover, Germany. Before starting her Bachelor degree she finished an apprenticeship in a library and was part of a one year exchange from Germany to the US. During her internship Katha is working on the new webite and GeoLing. In her free time she enjoys reading, travelling and taking photos.

Daniel McDermott is working at LINGUIST List on the Texas German Dialect Project. He graduated with a BA in Linguistics from California State University, Fullerton and is looking to pursue graduate studies in the near future. His primary interests involve the study of language change, language contact, and historical linguistics. His research pertains to the Germanic languages, namely German and Norwegian, as well as other languages with which these tongues have come into contact. By aiding in the study of Texas German, Daniel hopes to glean insight into the world of dialect studies from a computational perspective, so as to apply this knowledge to future research efforts. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, writing, and drumming.

Sarah Robinson is a new editor at LINGUIST List, having started her training in spring 2017. She hails from Northern Nevada, where she attended the University of Nevada, Reno and graduated with a BA in English with an Emphasis on Linguistics. She is currently working on an MA in General Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research interests are mainly in the realm of historical phonology, as well as philology and manuscript studies. In her spare time, she loves to read, hike, learn interesting new things, and play video games.

Melanie Smith is also contributing to the Texas German Dialect Project. She is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and will return to the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee in the fall to start her third year pursuing her BA in Linguistics and German, and minor in Japanese. She plans to spend the spring semester studying in Germany, and to eventually pursue graduate studies in Linguistics. Her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and language pedagogy. In her free time, she enjoys playing the piano, baking, and visiting museums.

The LINGUIST List invites undergraduate and graduate students as well as particularly motivated senior high school students to the 2017 summer internship program.

Interns at LINGUIST List have the opportunity to participate in the daily operations of the LINGUIST List, including editing submissions to the LINGUIST List and correspondence with linguists.

Apart from that interns will have the opportunity to work under the supervision of local or visiting faculty at The LINGUIST List on concrete research projects related to language and STEM sub-disciplines, language documentation, as well as engineering of software solutions and algorithms, mathematical concepts and methods, and technologies related to speech and language data.

Depending on individual interests or skills interns can get involved in the following LINGUIST List related projects for a certain proportion of their work time:

GeoLing: A web-application that maps LINGUIST List events, institutions, resources on a GIS system for mobile devices and access

Voice interface: Development of dialogs and speech interfaces for use with Amazon Echo/Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, etc. to provide LINGUIST List information over these voice systems/interfaces, develop new linguistic “skills” and extend existing ones

Improvement of the new LINGUIST List website and content, applications like Ask-a-Ling, and new services and applications

This summer, we are excited to welcome to the team 10 interns and volunteers! They are working on various projects such as Geoling and LL-Map, and they are also contributing to research on endangered languages by creating corpora for languages of around the world. If you are interested in becoming an intern, our application cycle will open again next spring. In the mean time, there are other ways to get involved here at LINGUIST List. Just contact us for more information.

So Eun joined the Linguist List as an intern during the summer of 2016. She is from Seoul, South Korea and currently studies German and Spanish at Vanderbilt University. Her work at the Linguist List includes creating speech corpus for Korean. She intends to pursue a Ph. D in linguistics upon completion of her undergraduate degree. She is particularly interested in studying and documenting endangered languages and hopes to apply her training experience to possibly annotating K’iche’, which she has studied this past year. In her free time, So Eun loves to read, write, and listen to good music.

Jacob is working at LINGUIST List as an intern for the summer of 2016, contributing to the LL-Map project. In May Jacob completed a B.A. with a triple major in Anthropology, International Studies, and Spanish and a minor in Linguistics at IU Bloomington, and eventually plans to pursue graduate studies in Linguistics. He has always had an interest in languages and linguistics, especially phonetics, historical linguistics, and the indigenous languages of the Americas. In his free time Jacob also enjoys running, reading, and cooking.

Clare is a summer intern at Linguist List, where she works on the GORILLA project, specifically developing the Yiddish Speech Corpus. She studied linguistics and computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, and is starting Indiana’s MS in Computational Linguistics this fall. Clare has taken courses in modern and classical Germanic, Celtic, Indic and Romance languages, and is especially interested in the study and preservation of under-resourced languages, endangered languages, and heritage languages.

Lewis is working as an intern at Linguist List for the summer of 2016. He is from St. Louis, MO and in the fall will return to Truman State University in northeastern Missouri to begin his third year pursuing a BS in Linguistics with minors in Sociology and Folklore. He hopes to continue his linguistic studies in graduate school as well. So far Lewis has been assisting with developing the GeoLing project. His research interests include French, Arabic, internet linguistics, creative word-formation processes, and constructed languages (of which he has created one and has a second planned). He also enjoys hiking, cooking, and social activism.

Noah Kaufman
This is Noah Kaufman. He graduated with a BA in Linguistics from McGill University and is now at IU for an M.S. in Computational Linguistics. He became interested in language because of how cool he thought it was that people could secretly talk to each other in a foreign language without others understanding them. This got him interested in language learning and later linguistics. Within linguistics, Noah mostly like sociolinguistics and how discourse constructs our biased mental models of the world which contribute to our judgements and power. At Linguist List I will be working on web development for the new website as well as Gorilla and Geoling.

Hai comes from Chengdu, China and has just finished his first year of the PhD program in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. His interests are corpus linguistics, syntactic theories (generative and computational) and documenting Chinese dialects. He is working on the LFG project at Linguist List this summer.

Simon Pierre Munyaneza is a summer intern for Linguist List. He is now working on Kinyarwanda speech corpus. He is currently a Doctoral student in Literacy Culture and Language Education – Indiana University Bloomington with a Minor in African Studies. His area of interest is mostly social linguistics and literacy. He speaks two European languages (French and English) and four African Languages Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, Lingala and Orunyankole­Rukiga and has been a languages teacher in Rwanda since 1999. He thinks that working at Linguist List, through Information Technology, will help him to save and revive numerous endangered African languages.

Julian will be interning at the Linguist list during the summer of 2016 until August, when he will start studying computational linguistics at Indiana University. Born in Germany, he moved to the United States at the age of 7, and was raised bilingual. His father is a professor for German linguistics, from whom his interest in the field developed. Julian’s hobbies include reading, traveling, and hiking.

William ShankmanWill is a summer intern for the Linguist List. He is a senior at IU planning to graduate with a major in Linguistics and a minor in Folklore/Ethnomusicology. He has studied Spanish, Chinese and Italian. He plans to get a graduate degree in Linguistics and one day perform ethnographic and linguistic research on cultures with endangered languages.

Qiaochu “Chloe” Chen
Chloe is a rising Junior at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. She majors in Linguistics and Computer Science, and minors in Art History and Psychology. As a summer intern here, she’s currently working on the MultiTree project. She is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and the Wu dialect spoken in the Yangtze River Delta. She has studied French and is about to start learning Arabic. She hopes to get a graduate degree in Computational Linguistics, and go on to use creative technology to solve problems in language documentation and conservation. Her interests in linguistics include bilingualism, dialectology, and linguistic relativity. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and visiting museums.

Please keep in mind that the dates of the core internship program are flexible and can be adapted to suite the summer break period of different systems, countries, and continents. Please contact us to discuss particular arrangements that you might need.

We would be happy to assist you with applications for supplemental funding and stipends. Various countries and educational or research organizations offer support opportunities to students. Please consider contacting your advisor and local University administration about funding opportunities and let us know how we could help you with the application.

It has been a busy summer here at The LINGUIST List! Please take a moment to check out the projects that our 2015 summer interns and volunteers have been working on!

Edvard Bikbaev

Edvard Bikbaev works on the GORILLA project at the LINGUIST List. To that end, he is creating and annotating the speech corpus for Russian, his native language. The speech corpus Edvard is involved with includes multiple annotated tiers and will be further used to train a forced aligner. In addition, Edvard translates contents of the GORILLA website, and updates MultiTree with linguistic publications in Russian. Edvard plans to apply for a PhD program in Computations Linguistics and use the Russian speech corpus he has created at Linguist List for his
dissertation.

Alec Wolyniec

Alec spends most of his time at the LINGUIST List creating the official LINGUIST List Google Chrome App, which will soon provide easy access to the upcoming GeoLing map and other LINGUIST List resources. He is also in the process of writing a script that automatically collects language data from Wiktionary and other open-source databases, and has so far used the program to extend the LINGUIST List’s Yiddish lexicon.

Clara García Gómez

Clara is mainly involved in the GORILLA Project creating a speech corpus for Castilian Spanish, of which she is a native speaker. She is creating materials necessary for automatic alignment and transcription. She also works on the translation of parts of the website into Spanish and in some editing tasks for LINGUIST List. She is interested in the study of undocumented languages so she is happy to participate in GORILLA and hope to contribute to this project further after creating the corpus for Castilian Spanish.

Jacob Henry

Jacob has spent most of his time working on the LL-MAP project, a large collection of maps containing linguistic and geographic information to be used by linguists, anthropologists, and other researchers.The LINGUIST List relocation Indiana University became an opportunity to relaunch and redesign the technologies. This has involved porting all of the data accumulated to new servers and testing various file formats to find the easiest to work with for our purposes. We’ve made some progress and ideally, we would be able to relaunch LL-MAP by the end of the summer.

Seyed Asghari

Seyed started working on Baharlu dialect of south Azeri Turkic language. It is a language that is being spoken in west Iran with the neighboring area of Persian, Kurdish, and Lori languages. He studied different writing styles used to produce the most suitable transcriptions. Moreover, he needed to study the standards of romanization of Baharlu Turkic. He worked on sample recordings, creating transcription, romanization, and translation.

During this work he has also started preparing a Baharlu-English dictionary that including original word, romanization, English translation and will be completed with other elements such as lemma, PoS and pronunciation information.

Petar Garžina

For the last two weeks, Petar has been mainly working on the Automatic Speech Recognition Project. Currently, he is working on the Croatian speech corpus and ASR. The first part of the project consists of making recordings and transcribing them. Along with building the corpus, he has been going through the documentation about Chrome Apps, and from the beginning of this week, he will start working alongside Alec on the LINGUIST List Chrome app. At the end of his internship, he would like to have a working Croatian Speech Recognizer, and an application that will ease the use of various LINGUIST List features.

Zac Branson

Zac has been working primarily on the front and back end of Geoling which can be found at geoling.linguistlist.org. Zac has additionally contributed to the Gorilla project (gorilla.linguistlist.org) including the development of resources to be provided by Gorilla.